Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, into a family involved in seed cultivation and commerce. From an early age, she produced drawings marked by dense fields of repeated marks, a practice that would remain central throughout her career. Formal training began at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, where she studied Nihonga painting while privately rejecting its constraints.
In the late 1950s, Kusama left Japan for the United States, settling in New York City in 1958. Her early work there consisted of large-scale paintings built from repeated loops and nets, executed with methodical consistency. These works were exhibited in artist-run spaces and small galleries, circulating alongside the emerging practices of minimalism and postwar abstraction.
During the 1960s, Kusama became visible within New York’s avant-garde through performances, installations, and public actions. Works such as “Narcissus Garden,” first presented at the Venice Biennale in 1966, consisted of mirrored spheres arranged to reflect both surroundings and viewers. The piece entered the record through documentation and press response rather than institutional endorsement, establishing a pattern that would recur across her career.
Throughout this period, Kusama maintained contact with artists including Donald Judd and Joseph Cornell while operating largely outside formal movements. Her work appeared in exhibitions connected to happenings, experimental film, and performance art, often recorded through photographs and contemporaneous accounts rather than sustained gallery representation.
By the early 1970s, Kusama withdrew from the New York art world and returned to Japan. She entered psychiatric care voluntarily, where she has continued to live and work. From this point forward, her production became highly regularized, consisting of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and writings generated through disciplined repetition.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Kusama’s work began to re-enter international circulation through exhibitions in Europe and the United States. Large installations featuring mirrored environments and repeated forms were presented in museum contexts, supported by catalog essays and curatorial framing. These works were documented extensively, contributing to a consolidated public record of her practice.
By the early 21st century, Kusama had become one of the most widely exhibited living artists. Retrospectives at major institutions assembled decades of work into unified narratives centered on repetition, accumulation, and scale. Her installations, particularly the “Infinity Mirror Rooms,” entered popular circulation through museum attendance and photographic reproduction.
Alongside institutional exhibitions, Kusama’s imagery appeared in commercial collaborations and mass-produced objects. These materials extended her visual language beyond gallery contexts while remaining consistent with earlier formal strategies.
Across more than seven decades, Kusama’s work has remained structurally continuous. Repetition, serial production, and controlled variation define her output across media and time. The record of her career reflects persistence rather than transformation, with changes in scale and visibility emerging through shifts in institutional context rather than alterations in method.
Kusama continues to produce work within a tightly maintained routine. Her position within contemporary art rests not on stylistic evolution but on the sustained execution of a single visual discipline, carried forward across decades and recorded through exhibition, documentation, and public circulation.